I came across an article called “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html A quote from there:
…Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood. Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4. Memory varies widely from person to person. Researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures. “We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory. People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.
So, what would be my first memory? Here’s another one. I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by sleds. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.
What I wanted to say, it took me about 20 minutes or so… watching snow. It was so beautiful to see its falling and everybody in the street didn’t seem to pay any attention to it… Continue reading ‘Culture, memory and snow’
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